This year, as we do every year, Pol Position celebrated Thanksgiving with a quiet ceremony to honor the turkeys that gave their lives so that we could afford to put another turkey on the table. And by that first “turkey,” we don’t mean the bird, although the second “turkey” does in fact mean turkey.

The first “turkey” of which we speak is used in the B.A. Baracus/Mr. T dialect to describe a person that is strange, peculiar, goofy, weird, and confounding. It was coined to by Baracus’ after he encountered mentally unstable A-Team teammate “Howlin’ Mad” Murdoch, and continually used by the man whenever he encountered similar types of people.

The turkeys of which we speak are those lucky New York City politicians, the very “pols” that we refer to here in the title of this column. And if you aren’t already sick of us defining “terms” here in the introduction, we’ll quit vamping and get to the point: just because it’s Sarah Palin pardoned a poultry, that doesn’t mean we’re going to let any of our political turkeys get a free pass just because it’s a holiday weekend.

As any reader of this paper knows, two politicians, one from Brooklyn and one from Queens, felt the need to legislate bottles of water right out of city offices. The bottles, which are a choking hazard for individuals under the age of 3, an age which many if not all city employees have passed decades ago, should prove that there is no problem regarding the consumption of water from a plastic, nozzle-topped tube.

And since most of these city employees are adults, why should they be denied the right to make the purchases that any free business can make. According to the councilmen, whose names can be found on another page of this very newspaper, they are an expensive luxury, and since the city is currently undergoing a crisis-level financial strain, have been deemed not only unnecessary but contraband!

Pol Position generally (at least for today) loathes excessive legislation, even when it would result in something we dig, like more money for the city. And, for the sake of being contrary, we will take up the cause of the poor employees of city agencies who will be forced to drink New York City tap water.

Federal agencies have rated New York City’s tap water as some of the cleanest in the nation, and it is certainly more drinkable than the water in other, less industrialized cities like Baton Rouge, Newark, and Staten Island. But while the water may be drinkable, we wouldn’t put our lips within thirty feet of this city’s pipe infrastructure. (That may explain Pol Position’s overall rancid odor and plaque-caked teeth.)

The water and plumbing infrastructure in New York City, especially in Queens and Brooklyn (where the regular folks live!) is a knot of rust, lead, microbes and tetanus. (That’s if tetanus isn’t a microbe, we’re not sure.)

Wherever the water was tested, it sure wasn’t from the faucet in any of our staff’s homes, that’s for sure. It likely came from the ivory-carved sink of Gracie Mansion or directly from the groundwater, by way of the old, creaky well in the sub-basement of City Hall that the council members use.

If this legislation passes, it may provide the city with a windfall savings of several hundreds of thousands of dollars, but what happens when its employees succumb en masse to the horrors of substandard piping. With City Planning running out of space to bury the bodies, and the Parks Department scouring Prospect Park for some kind of drinkable water (they’ll find none), there will be no one left to run the city. And with no city employee salaries to pay, the city will start saving some real money. It’s all part of the plan.